Metroid Prime: Hunters

I have to admit, I was skeptical. When I bought my DS, I bought it for New Super Mario Bros. But, being the huge fan of the Metroid series that I am, I picked up Hunters as well, expecting a decent, but not enthralling game.

I was completely wrong. For those of you who have played Metroid: Prime or Metroid Prime 2: Echoes for GameCube, imagine the same experience, pocket-sized.

For those of you who haven’t experienced Metroid’s new flavor, I feel sorry for you because this game is worth a DS. Period.

Metroid Prime: Hunters starts with our femme fatale hero, Samus Aran, investigating the source of a mysterious telepathic message which claims to hold the key to “ultimate power.” What this “ultimate power” is exactly, you, as Samus, don’t know, but you’ve been sent to the source to investigate. However, unlike other Metroid games, you are not the only 1337 bounty hunter searching for the answer to this problem. Instead, you’re up against other “Hunters,” who are searching for the “ultimate power” for various, albeit predictable, reasons (one of the hunters wants the power to destroy stuff...go figure).

The game itself features a single-player story and a multiplayer mode where up to four gamers can compete using the DS’s built in wifi connection off of one (or multiple) game cards. In addition, the game features support for various control methods as well as complete (and startlingly effective) surround sound.

I have seen a PSP in action and despite all that I had heard about how incredibly sweet the graphics were; I remember being distinctly underwhelmed. Kind of one of those “oh, that’s it?” moments. The graphical capabilities of the DS are roughly half of the PSP’s, but when I started Hunters for the first time, I was blown away; here is a near carbon-copy of the features that make the versions on GameCube great. Hunters has all of Metroid’s trademark 3D-modeled (as in, not texture reliant) detailing, atmospheric cues, and silky smooth framerate.

Even though the graphics are impressive, the best part of this game is the control scheme. The DS is unique among consoles in that is has a touch-screen, and while many games make use of the touch-screen in some way (some, like Brain Age, actually use it for writing), Hunters’ use of the stylus is the most impressive. Hardcore fans of the first-person genre swear by the keyboard-and-mouse targeting mechanism for its intuitive ease of use and ability for more precise control. By using the touch-screen of the DS in a similar fashion to a computer mouse, Hunters creates the same, intuitive feel. The Metroid series relies heavily on jumping for level progression (it is a platformer, historically), and with a quick flick of the stylus, landing on platforms becomes a cinch (whereas the fixed-rate rotation provided by a button-based movement system makes jumping a more difficult task). I’ll admit that it does take some getting used to at first, but once you have it down, man, there’s no going back.

Unfortunately, and this is a consistent complaint I have with all handheld games, Hunters falls short in the sound department. For 80% of the game, all is well...the surround sound works well and most sounds reveal few artifacts of their compression. However, at points in the game, the low bit-rate of the sounds becomes readily apparent, almost to the point of being painful. Granted, this happens infrequently, but it happens enough to remind you that no matter how good the game is, you’re still playing on a handheld.

One of the biggest selling points of the game is its multiplayer, and I have to agree that it’s awesome. The framerate stayed consistently high regardless of arena, who I was battling, or which particular Hunter I had chosen to be. The matches are quite intense, far better than the been-there done-that boring battles of Halo. Hunters’ are fast-paced, difficult, and genuinely exciting. Each character has two separate battle-modes (the traditional, upright shooter and the morph-ball bomb-dropping mode) and all of them are strong characters; no single one is the “good one.” This is multiplayer the way multiplayer is supposed to be.

Metroid Prime: Hunters is an instant classic. It is the killer-app for the DS. It is a game where, even though its selling point is the multiplayer, the story mode is good enough to warrant the purchase. If you like first-person shooters, if you like action-adventure, if you like a good storyline, this is your game.